My Review on the iPad

A couple of weeks ago I picked up the 16GB 3G iPad as sort of a birthday gift from me to me. It’s something I’ve been contemplating for a while and finally pulled the trigged. I promised quite a few people a review on the device now that I own it and while I didn’t do rigorous testing, I used it in the most common testing environments- my house, other offices, the train, meetings, and using it for travel instead of my laptop. You can see my thoughts after the jump.

My overall feeling is that the iPad is great for consuming information. I love reading the news and my social network stuff on it. While I can do minimal work on it (without the physical keyboard attachement), it can be a bit cumbersome at times and am not sure that it could prove a viable replacement on longer trips where I might be spending time in a hotel room. Maybe the keyboard would change that. It’s not great for doing a bunch of things at once, but I can see the keyboard helping with doing paperwork (proposals, emails, documents, etc), and maybe some basic programming.

The Good

• 3G is fast. Setting it up is very easy
• Typing is a lot easier than I thought it would be
• The Calendar & other built in programs are very well designed. Plus, Calendar syncs with Google
• The battery life is about 10% an hour if you’re not doing a million things
• Waiting online for a concert, a few friends and I played Scrabble and the battery used was less than 60% after 3 straight hours;  this was a little better than what I expected
• After several days over these 2 weeks of using data, I’ve used less than 70/2000MB. That’s very good, though I didn’t stream video
• Great Apps: TWC Max+ (weather), Flipboard (Newspaper style app using Twitter), Sports Center XL, USA Today

The Bad

• I was hoping to use this to edit my book. Tracking/making edits in Pages should be MUCH easier. If someone could recommend a better program for proof reading/basic edits/tracking changes, I’d love you forever
• Sharing stories on social networks is a bit of a hassle unless the app maker builds in the functionality (which honestly, should be up to them to do anyway)
• The screen is a magnet for finger prints
• The Kindle is still much better for reading books- it’s lighter and easier on the eyes. The Kindle app for iPad is quite nice though
• It’s a little heavier than I’d like it to be

Overall, I’m pretty happy with it. My primary uses will be for travel where I don’t need my laptop (IE, won’t be doing a lot of work), taking it to school on short days, using it to take notes at meetings (tried it the other day and it was OK. I’m guessing I just need to find the right app), showing off my portfolio at meetings using the Photo app, and reading the news/morning ‘triage.’

Do you own the iPad? What do you think? Are there any apps you’d like me to review?